Storm Before the Calm: Martha Jefferson's Rebellion
"For god’s sake, for your country’s sake, and for my sake, come...I am under sacred obligation to go home"
Jefferson to Richard Henry Lee 29 July 1776
Fawn Brodie was among the first of Thomas Jefferson‘s biographers to comment on the gaps in Jefferson's activities during his early political career. It is generally accepted that Jefferson suspended his public service to tend his wife whose health was impaired by difficulties in childbirth. We dispute this contention on the grounds that there is little in the way of documentary support for it. Jefferson destroyed his correspondence with his wife so the truth will never be certainly known, but circumstantial evidence points to a different reality: Jefferson abbreviated his participation in the War for American Independence to placate his rebellious wife.
Storm At Home
Jefferson was twenty-nine years old when he married Martha Wayles Skelton on New Years Day, 1772. The ceremony took place at John Wayles' farm, the Forest, on the James River between Williamsburg and Richmond where the young widow lived with her son and her widowed father. Mary, her fourteen-year old sister, was probably a member of the household. Her sister Elizabeth and her husband Francis Eppes may have also had their residence there at the time.
The marriage took place twenty-three months to the day after Jefferson’s childhood home had burned to the ground. Jefferson had lived there with his mother for six years after coming of age and gaining his substantial inheritance from his deceased father. At the time Shadwell burned on 1 February 1770, the twenty-seven year old Jefferson was one of the largest landowners in Albemarle County.
Two years before the fire, Jefferson had begun to prepare a site on a hillock across the Rivanna River from Shadwell. In the spring of 1769 he began to excavate the foundations for the outbuildings of his future home. The pavilion on the south wing was not finished at the time of the fire, but it was far enough along for Jefferson to take up residence before the end of the year. This was the home to which he brought his new bride on that first snowy night in mid-January.
Jefferson was twenty six when the mating-call finally sounded in his psyche. When it did, he had difficulty identifying a suitable object for his manly ardor. Years later his neighbor and friend John Walker would accuse him of making illicit advances to his wife. Walker claimed that the affair began in 1769 and continued until 1779 – seven years after Jefferson’s (supposedly idyllic) marriage to Martha. Jefferson acknowledged at least some truth to the charge in a letter to Robert Smith in 1805, “You will perceive that I plead guilty to one of their charges, that when young and single I offered love to a handsome lady. I acknowledge its incorrectness.”
Thomas and Martha appear to have been a spiritual match. Accounts of her portray an attractive woman with a refined and artistic character. Claude Bowers claimed that “she was beautiful, an little above medium height, and with a lithe and exquisitely formed figure, with graceful and queen-like carriage...She was better educated than the average Virginia belle of the day and her mind was superior. She read more widely than most and could discuss books with intelligence and discernment." Martha was twenty-four years old at the time of her second marriage. That she and her new husband would play duets together, she the pianoforte, he the violin, suggests that Jefferson had found the life companion he seems to have suddenly needed.
Martha should have been pleased too by the opportunity her second marriage presented. The prospects for her life had darkened with the premature death of her first husband. As a widow living at home with her fatherless son she was actively courted. Perhaps she found it difficult to distinguish among the opportunists seeking the hand of a rich landowner's daughter a man who would make a good husband and father for her child. We can imagine how Jefferson’s patient gentle suit persuaded her that he was such a man. In accepting his proposal she was taking for a husband, besides a welltodo member of Virginia's aristocracy, a successful lawyer with scores of clients, a rising star in
the quiet politics of the colony, a man with a sensitive and artistic
mperament to match her own. One suspects that she saw in him a transcending quality–a man who would care for her and care for her son.
Their life together started well. Their first child was born on schedule nine months after their wedding. For another nine months Jefferson appears to have been content as his wife’s companion. Their life was not without sadness though. The year 1773 was a bitter one for both of them and it must have been solace for each to draw on the other's love and strength. On May 16th, Jefferson's brother-in-law and dearest friend, Dabney Carr, died suddenly of a fever. Martha's father followed within a fortnight dying on May 28th at the age of fifty-eight. But in early July, Martha conceived again. Nine months later Martha gave birth to a daughter they named Jane Randolph in honor of Jefferson's mother. In early September, Jefferson traveled to Lynchburg to visit property that he had inherited from his fatherinlaw. Poplar Forest was a forty-five hundred acre tract that would in time become his treasured santucary.
During these eighteen months, Jefferson continued to represent his county as a member of the House of Burgesses. This service was not taxing–altogether he spent less than two months sitting in three legislative sessions.
Political friction had begun to eroded relations between the Crown and its American colonies in 1772, but these were still pockets of discontent. The situation began to change in 1773. Jefferson evidently noticed. When Virginia’s burgesses met in March, 1773, he and his group of “young Turks”, following the lead of their Boston cousins, drafted a resolution calling for the legislature to form a Committee of Correspondence. Stern Lord Dunmore responded by proroguing the Assembly. As a member of the new committee, Jefferson had responsibility to keep abreast of developments in Virginia#'s sister colonies, but in his Autobiography, he makes no comment on such activities. Nor is there any indication that he was politically active from the time he left the capital in late March 1773, until May of 1774 when Dunmore reconvened the Assembly.
Jefferson's inactivity during this long vacation does not mean that sentiments were improving in the colonies. On December 16th, mounting tension erupted into violence when a band of “patriots“ stormed on board a ship in Boston Harbor and dumped its cargo into the sea to protest Parliament’s decision granting the financially-troubled East India Company a monopoly in the colonial tea market.
We can imagine Jefferson stirring Ahab-like from his repose. It may have startled Martha to find her husband's attention straying from the domestic concerns that had anchored their partnership during the previous eighteen months. She may have shared his sentiments, but there is no evidence that she was a political soulmate as Abigail Adams was to John. She may simply have accepted the new tone in her capacity as a dutiful wife. This is not, however, what one expects of a beautiful, intelligent woman who appears to have carefully selected her new mate from a flock of suitors. A third alternative therefore deserves consideration: Martha began to feel alienated as her husband's political activities claimed more of his time and attention.
In the accepted view, Marth transforms, seemingly overnight, from a vibrant partner into a convalescent. Responding to a higher call, Jefferson then leaves his public posts and returns to the hearth to superintend her care.
This haggard image hardly squares with the woman who first journeyed to Monticello. In the words of Claude Bowers: "As the carriage rumbled over the intermediate miles the snow increased alarmingly in depth. The carriage made hard going and at length the young couple abandoned the vehicle, mounted the horses and pressed on. They paused for brief rests at "Blenheim" where only an
overseer was in charge, and then, with courage renewed, they dared the mountain tract at sunset. They were still 8 miles from Monticello, and the snow was from 18 to 24 inches deep. "
According to this famous family account, Martha was a woman with a fine vigorous spirit and an indomitable will. It is neither necessary or creditable to think she was defeated by the two successful pregnancies she had completed prior to Jefferson’s service in the Continental Congress. Nor was she ill or pregnant when Jefferson
began to worry about his "domestic affairs”. A better explanation for the disorder in Jefferson’s domestic affairs is found in Martha’s vigorous spirit.
1774 was a watershed year politically for both Thomas Jefferson and the American Colonies. Governor Dunmore finally summoned the Assembly in early May. The burgesses convened around the middle of the month. Shortly after taking their places, grim news arrived from Boston - unless the vandals who staged the "Boston Tea Party" on 16 December of the preceding year were presented for prosecution, Parliament would close the Port of Boston. The deadline was the 1st of June.
On May 24th, the outraged burgesses approved in a unanimous vote a resolution–evidently drafted by Jefferson–calling for the citizens of Virginia to set aside June 1st as "a day of fasting and prayer.” Jefferson was content to have his fellow burgess, Robert Carter Nicholas, "whose grave & religious character was more in unison with the tone of our resolution," present the inflammatory document to the Assembly. Two days later, Governor Dunmore summoned the legislators to the council room on the upper floor of the capital and, with the published resolution in hand, dissolved the Assembly again.
As they had done under similar circumstances before, the homeless burgesses retired to the Apollo Room of the Raleigh Tavern. The following day, May 27th, after signing an association to boycott tea and other commodities sold by the East India Company, they agreed that "an attack, made on one of our sister colonies, to compel submission to arbitrary taxes, is an attack made on all British America."
Jefferson attended the meeting of the committee of correspondence on the 28th where a letter was drafted to be sent to the other colonies asking them to appoint delegates to a national congress. On May 30th Jefferson was again present when the depleted ranks of former burgesses met for a third time to consider a newly arrived plea from Boston requesting Virginia to adopt a strict non-importation/non-exportation agreement. Feeling they lacked the authority to make this commitment, they instead decided to call a general "convention" to convene August 1st. Jefferson was among the signers of the letter produced at this meeting calling the members of the prorogued assembly to gather the sentiments of their constituents.
Many no doubt expected Jefferson, the intellectual force behind the emerging protest movement, to lead the June 1st demonstration. According to the impassioned wording of his resolution, the citizens of Virginia would be gathering "devoutly to implore the divine Interposition for averting the heavy Calamity, which threatens destruction to our civil Rights, and evils of civil War....” Despite the solemnity of the invocation and the mortal nature of the crisis, when the last piece of business was finished on May 31, 1774, Jefferson gathered his things and left town. In his Autobiography he wrote, "We returned home, and in our several counties invited the clergy to meet assemblies of the people on the 1st of June, to perform the ceremonies of the day, & to address to them discourses suited to the occasion." St Anne’s Parish in Charlottesville, Jefferson’s church, postponed its day of fasting and prayer for a month. There is no record of Jefferson taking part in the belated protest. Whatever Jefferson was doing on June 1st, his absence must have been felt by his colleagues as they marched in the ominous shadow of the Governor's Mansion to Bruton Parish Church.
Perhaps Jefferson was, as he suggested in his Autobiography, concerned to share the word with his constituents at home. Perhaps he was responding to the wishes of a wife uncomfortable with public defiance of her sovereign lord. More likely, he wanted to get started on a paper he had decided to write summarizing the grievances that justified the ex-burgess’s call for a state convention. Judging by the length and complexity of the Summary View of the Rights of British
America it took several weeks to research and write the piece. Even so, we know that his attention was not completely absorbed by this consequential project. There was time enough, for example, to complete the land transaction he had been contemplating since visiting Poplar Forest, John Wayles' Lynchburg farm, the previous September.
We do not know what Martha thought of his growing antiBritish activism, but as a mother with young children she it is reasonable to expect that she had misgivings about her husband's revolutionary
positions. As it was a crime to preach sedition, there was also a bona fide reason for concern about his safety and her own wellbeing. In the event the Crown prosecuted him, there was reason to expect that the trial would be held in England. How would she manage? What would happen to her children? We can assume that in a closeknit relationship of the sort Jefferson is thought to have had with his wife these things would have been discussed.
Martha might have been goaded by an unsatisfactory answer to prod her husband about his plans for finishing the house. Construction records suggest that the south wing still remained to be bricked and that the central section, which formed the core of the house, may not have been enclosed at this time. However majestic the view from Monticello Mountain, it could not have been pleasant living in the midst of the massive construction project Jefferson was sporadically advancing.
Martha’s concerns may have pinched at the corners of Jefferson's mind as he assembled his list of grievances. He completed his paper in time to take it with him to the convention in Williamsburg. He left Monticello at the end of July. En route he was attacked by a mysterious stomach ailment so severe that he was compelled to return home. He forwarded copies of his paper to Peyton Randolph and Patrick Henry, but remained in seclusion as the convention determined not to endorse his extreme positions. While the Convention’s delegates were too conservative to publicly endorse his arguments, they were wellreceived by more radical men throughout the colonies. Soon enough the paper was published in England where it reportedly came to the attention of the King himself.
We can understand Jefferson’s anxiety about the reception his paper would get at the Convention. The frightening implications of being a leader in the spreading rebellion must also have affected him. Whatever his concerns, we can assume that they were significant because he remained at Monticello, withdrawn from the political movement he had been instrumental in launching, for the next eight months. This extended absence suggests that something more significant than a stomach ailment got hold of him on his way to Williamsburg.
This, the third occasion where Jefferson turned up AWOL for an event he had helped to arrange, may reflect his disgust toward men who were too timid to grasp the nettle. It might also have reflected a growing uneasiness on the part of Martha..
It is reasonable to assume that sometime during this eight-month sabbatical Martha shared her concerns with her husband. Perhaps he was conciliatory. From the little we know, it was a peaceful domestic interlude which suggests that Thomas and Martha had reached an understanding and were again in accord.
In the winter of 1775, Jefferson was re-elected as a delegate to the Virginia Convention. On March 20th he reentered public life, attending the Convention’s second session which met in Richmond at the Saint John's Parish Church. “The war is actually begun,” Patrick Henry told Jefferson and the rest of his audience on March 23rd. One of Jefferson's committee assignments was to prepare a plan for a militia and for the defense of the colony in the event of attack. Among the final acts of the convention were the re-election of the previous slate of delegates to the 2nd Continental Congress. One sees that Jefferson continued to hold the esteem of his political colleagues despite his absence by his appointment as a deputy to serve in Philadelphia if Peyton Randolph should be called back from its proceedings.
On April 19th in Concord, Massachusetts the shot was fired "heard round the world." Jefferson received the disturbing news at Monticello. Early the following morning in Williamsburg, Governor Dunmore removed the powder from the town’s arsenal under cover of
darkness. Hoping to defuse the deepening crisis, Dunmore subsequently called a new assembly to present a newly arrived proposal from Lord North. Jefferson was there again when the House of Burgesses met on June 1st. The following week he drafted the burgesses' response to North. In the meantime Peyton Randolph had departed Philadelphia and returned to Williamsburg to lead the burgesses through this crisis. On the 11th, Jefferson left to fill Randolph's vacated seat. With him he had his draft of the Virginia Assembly's response to Lord North. In this swift march of events,
Jefferson had little time to prepare his wife for his entry into the national forum. It is not clear whether he saw her before he left. While he was in transit, on June 14th, Congress voted to raise an army. On the 17th, four days before Jefferson reached his destination, the British and Americans forces fought the Battle of Bunker Hill outside Boston. Two days after Jefferson arrived in Philadelphia, on June 23rd, he was appointed to a committee to draft a declaration to be read by General Washington to his troops upon taking his command.
In the course of writing his draft for the Declaration on Causes and Necessity for Taking Up Arms Jefferson paused to write Francis Eppes. He must have felt a combination of exhilaration and foreboding to inform his brotherinlaw that "the war is now heartily entered". Two weeks later Jefferson was called on to draft the Congress' response to Lord North's Conciliatory Proposal. Congress approved this piece on July 31st. On August 2nd, Congress recessed and Jefferson left for Monticello. On his way home, Jefferson stopped at the Convention in Richmond where he witnessed his election to his own one year term in the Philadelphia Congress.
While Martha’s reaction to this string of events is not known, we do know that in early September sixteen-month old Jane Randolph died. On September 26th, not more than a couple weeks after her death, Jefferson left his wife and surviving daughter and returned to Philadelphia. Martha apparently left Monticello about the same time. Her destination was again The Forest which was now the residence of her sister and brotherinlaw. She must have been in a dark frame of mind. Her daughter was the second child and third member of her immediate family to die in four years. She had been left to manage a bustling household in the middle of a massive construction site. And it was harvest time. Despite all this, her husband had abandoned her to risk life and limb in a political revolution.
Although she was probably grieving for her lost child, there is no reason to believe that she was ill. Under the circumstances her grief might have been tinged with anger. Her husband had after all demonstrated a greater interest in making war on the British King than caring for his wife and family. What happened to the understanding they reached the previous fall?
In these prickly circumstances Jefferson wrote a tense letter to his brother-in-law from Philadelphia. It had been six weeks since he left his wife at Monticello. "I have never received the script of pen from any mortal in Virginia since I have left it," he raged helplessly, "nor been able by any enquiries I could make to hear of my family... The suspense under which I am is too terrible to endure." Martha had not written him. Since there is no indication that she was ill, it appears she chose not to. Under the circumstances it is certainly possible that she was shunning her absent-tee husband. When he received his first letter, we do not know. He did, however, remain seven more weeks in Philadelphia where he prepared two more reports for the Congress.
Jefferson arrived at Monticello shortly after New Years. Late in January it appears he drafted a response to King George’s speech to Parliament the previous October. His Refutation of the Argument that the Colonies Were Established at the Expense of the British Nation echoed the ideas he had presented in the Summary View in 1774 and foreshadowed views he would later express in his draft of the Declaration of Independence. There is no record, however, of either incoming or outgoing mail. On February 4th his friend Thomas Nelson broke the silence with a letter from Philadelphia. Nelson began by observing, “I had written you soon after the repulse of our Troops at Quebec, giving you, as I thought, a true state of that unfortunate affair...Troops are marching every day from hence to support the remains of our Army before Quebec... The Committee of safety of New York however sent a remonstrance to Lee setting forth the extreme danger the City would be in from the Men of War, should he enter it.”
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